Transforming Democracy And Politics In The Digital Age

The digital revolution has radically transformed social life and political cultures, as many forms of political activity have moved online and new forms of media have enabled new forms of political engagement. Many argue that these revolutionary transformations, such as peer production mechanisms like social media, offer new possibilities for digital democracy. Digital innovation from its origins has been closely tied to a democratic imaginary that seeks maximum user control, flexibility, participation, and modification in a collaborative (open source) sharing context. As participatory digital tools have developed they have inspired a number of projects that explicitly seek to increase democratic participation of citizens, whether that be within smaller communities that might also meet face to face (such as Loomio) or within much larger political communities such as the tool developed for voting within Plaza Podemos (in Spain) or the participatory tools used in Taiwan by the activists hacker community g0v. These tools are also being proposed as means for other ways of regenerating democracy such as controlling corruption, improving citizen information, defending human rights, empowering marginalized groups , and exposing government wrongdoing (such as Wikileaks, or Filtrala).

The PhD project will centre around the following questions and should be based on specific case studies to analyze them:

How are these digitally enabled participatory tools transforming democracy, if at all?
How are they involved in raising citizen demand for democracy and enabling it?
How are these tools rooted in particular democratic imaginaries and digital imaginaries and what is the connection between these?
What specific challenges and limitations do these innovations face?
What is the role of culture in fostering or challenging the digital transformation of politics?
How do power, social inequalities and the State shape the possibilities for new media and digital tchnologies to facilitate political participation and other transformations of democracy?
How have these new tools transformed collective action and mobilization processes?

Although the project is based on specific case studies involving digital technology and/or new media, the theoretical focus of the PhD should be on the social scientific aspects of these innovations and their relation to democracy.

Students will need to be familiar with the digital and/or new media platforms or software that they will be drawing on for their case studies and have a background in sociology, politics, media studies or related discipline.